Richard Desmond's Channel 5 is set to record the biggest TV advertising haul in the broadcaster's 14-year history, with revenue up 28% to more than £350m this year owing to factors such as the reality show Big Brother.

Channel 5 has managed to increase its year-on-year TV advertising take by about £70m – the broadcaster made about £280m in TV ad revenue in 2010 – as a new sales strategy, strong programming and the return of some key advertisers fuelled huge growth this year.

Desmond's deal to bring Big Brother to the channel – a £20m multi-year agreement finally struck in March with the programme's producer Endemol – has dramatically increased the advertiser-friendly audience of 16 to 34 year olds.

Channel 5 also benefited from the return of TV advertising spending from clients represented by the media agency Aegis, which buys advertising space for brands including Asda, British Gas and Coca-Cola, which came off the broadcaster for the best part of nine months last year. The return of Aegis has flattered Channel 5's figures to an extent, but media agency sources that have analysed the impact estimate that it has accounted for less than 50% of the £70m increase this year.

To help combat the scale disadvantage that Channel 5 has against rivals such as ITV and Channel 4, which makes it tougher to pull in advertisers, Desmond has tasked his sales force to offer innovative deals that combine with his newspaper and magazine titles such as the Daily Star, Daily Express and OK!.

One example is the launch campaign for the film Paranormal Activity 3, which combined a premiere outside the Big Brother house, which included coverage during the TV show with two housemates watching from a perspex box, on top of TV and print advertising.

Channel 5 is not the only broadcaster to have performed well despite the toughening advertising climate. The UK TV advertising market, worth about £3.5bn, is expected to be up 1% year-on-year at most. ITV, which accounts for almost half the market, is expected to perform in line with that pulling in about £1.5bn in TV advertising revenue.

When revenues from the rest of its broadcasting activities are included – such as online business ITV.com, TV sponsorship and multiplex business SDN – the broadcaster will make about £1.8bn.

Stripping out this boost, BSkyB's like-for-like sales performance is expected to be up about 2% ahead of the market.

Channel 4's TV ad sales is expected to be up about 14% year-on-year to £930m. However, like Sky, this is skewed by the addition to its portfolio of the sales contract for UKTV, owner of channels including Dave and Gold. When this is stripped out, Channel 4 sales – across E4, More4 and Film4 – is expected by media industry sources to be down about 1.5%.

Desmond swooped to snap up Channel 5 for £103.5m from RTL which also owns the X Factor co-producer FremantleMedia, last summer after the pan-European broadcaster tired of failing to grow the smallest of the UK's main broadcasters into a major player. In the year before Desmond acquired Channel 5 it had made a total loss of €41m (£37m), or a €9m loss at an operating level.